Copyright as a Moral Hazard

by Jeffrey Tucker, Mises Economics Blog
Jun. 24, 2010

You can tell that intellectual property rights are not real property rights just from this very interesting item on BoingBoing, a report on round one of the Google vs. Viacom case. With real property rights, people do not usually go around actively violating their own rights in order to collect from innocent defendants. I’m not even sure I understand how that would work in a case of real property rights. But in this Viacom case:

Filings in the case reveal that Viacom paid dozens of marketing companies to clandestinely upload its videos to YouTube (sometimes “roughing them up” to make them look like pirate-chic leaks). Viacom uploaded so much of its content to YouTube that it actually lost track of which videos were “really” pirated, and which ones it had put there, and sent legal threats to Google over videos it had placed itself.

Why would Viacom have done that if the company really believed that these postings were hurting its business? Perhaps they believed they would help the business: promoting its product and creating an opportunity for legal blackmail.